Many systems and applications have been developed to allow people to communicate with each other. Such systems and applications may communicate via emails, instant messages, text messages, web/online postings, etc. Some user terminals (e.g., personal computers, PDA, and mobile phones) may support communications in multiple modes, such as email, instant messages, and text messages.
Conventional applications have been developed to organize address information for users. For example, an address application may store information about a plurality of persons. For each of the persons, the address application may store the name of the person, the email address of the person, the street address of the person, the IM address of the person, the web page address of the person, phone numbers of the person, etc.
Despite these capabilities of conventional address applications, the initial capture of the address information is often dependent on users of the applications to proactively acquire the address information from communications with others. Only then can the captured information be stored and organized by the conventional address applications. The completeness of address information stored and organized in conventional address applications thus relies heavily on the diligence exercised by the users.
Users often do not capture different types of address information regarding their contacts for a variety of reasons. For example, users may wish to avoid the expenditure of extra time and effort to obtain various address information from their contacts. As another example, users may believe that the limited address information that they have already obtained from their contacts is sufficient for their current communication purposes. As yet another example, users may not realize that certain address information for their contacts is missing and thus do not proceed to acquire it. The lack of address information can be detrimental to establishing and enabling complete and effective communications between users and their contacts.